Cliff
>t's an example of convergent evolution, different organisms with
>different genes having analogous phenotypes; a familiar concept.
>As to putting together organic parts, the symbiotic theory of the origin
>of cellular complexity seems to fill the bill.
>Consider the complexities of our economy; consider the various ways
>we spend money and the complex reasons for the choices we make,
>where the money goes next and why etc etc. It's an unfathomably elaborate
>thing. Then compare the economy a communist planner might set up,
>with simple specification of required production and directed consumption.
>Why is a designer required on grounds of complexity, when the natural order
>can generate complexity ad infinitum?
--Hi Cliff,
I like your analogy about an economy. It isn't planned. (In fact, we've
discovered that "planned" economies don't work.) However economies are
created by intelligence. Nothing is random. Each and every event was the
result of an intelligent decision. Even a stupid decision is the result of
intelligence. Each economic event was performed for a specific purpose.
Each event was contingent upon all the events that have occurred before it
and are occurring around it. Good decisions and bad decisions-added all
together, they function as a whole.
My version of ID is that life is designed by the intelligence contained
within life itself. To understand life we have to move beyond the simplistic
model envisioned by most materialists and include the ingredient that
distinguishes life from non-life -- choice. Intelligence of a sort is
included in every molecule of living matter. Intelligence and choice are
difficult to distinguish. Certainly choice couldn't exist in the absence of
intelligence.
I probably disagree with ID as most people conceive it, but I am not a
materialist. And I have developed a distaste for the arrogant intolerance of
most people who promote materialism. People in the ID movement dare to look
beyond materialism. In any case, the evidence that the whole system was
designed seems overwhelming to me. I am underwhelmed by the evidence for
"random mutation and natural selection", but I grant everyone the right to
their own under or overwhelming. I suspect symbiosis goes beyond the origin
of cellular complexity. Like an economy, whatever concept of life emerges
will be symbiotic, the sum of all the diverse, individual thought s about the
subject.
Bertvan
http://members.aol.com/bertvan
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